Shiitake

The Healing Mushroom

Kenneth Jones

• Publisher: Healing Arts Press
• Year: 1994
• Print ISBN: 9780892814992
• eBook ISBN: 9781620551868
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Alternative & Complementary Medicine

The shiitake is one of the most highly prized foods in Oriental cuisine, lending its rich, caramel-like flavor to seasonings, sauces, soups, even carbonated drinks and candies. Yet few aficionados of this gourmet delicacy are aware of its high nutritional value or of its important role in traditional Chinese medicine and in the modern search for botanical remedies. Traditionally classified as a food that activates the blood, shiitake has been used as a folk treatment for colds, measles, and bronchial inflammations. Shiitake: The Healing Mushroom takes the reader on a lively tour of the healing properties of one of the world's most delicious foods.In the past few years, its growing popularity in the West has made shiitake, after the common table mushroom, the most-cultivated mushroom worldwide. Recent studies indicate its usefulness in lowering blood cholesterol levels and preventing heart disease. Research suggests that shiitake is valuable in immunotherapy, bolstering the immune system and increasing the body's ability to ward off cancerous tumors, viral infections, and chronic fatigue syndrome.The N.I.H. is testing shiitake in their AIDS research program.

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ONE

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A Food from the Forest

In the Oriental marketplace, whether here or across the Pacific, the shiitake mushroom is one of the most cherished of foods. In Japan, where for centuries the best products were reserved for royalty, shiitake has been called the “king” or “monarch of the mushrooms,” thereby denoting a food of superior taste and quality. Shiitake is a Japanese name deriving from take, mushroom, and shii, a kind of chestnut tree (Castanopsis cuspidata) that the mushroom was commonly found growing on in Japan.¹ As a forest mushroom, shiitake will grow on many kinds of trees, including alder, chestnut, maple, oak, walnut, and ebony.² When fresh, it has the coloration of a young fawn, complete with those lighter-colored spots. When dried, the cap becomes cracked, taking on the appearance of old leather.

The legacy of shiitake as a highly regarded food plant was furthered by the British botanist Miles Joseph Berkeley (1803–1889). He made certain that people would eventually notice its delights when he named it Lentinus edodes, the Latin edodes meaning edible.³ Recently, shiitake’s Latin name was changed to Lentinula edodes (Berkeley) Pegler, but that did nothing to affect its appeal. Next to the common table mushroom (Agaricus bisporus), shiitake is the most popular and most cultivated of all exotic mushrooms worldwide.⁴ Fresh or dried, in seasonings, sauces, soup mixes, noodle stocks, carbonated health drinks, food supplements, and candies, shiitake has about as many uses in the Oriental diet as tomatoes have in the West. One Japanese product uses the mushroom to produce a potassium-rich yogurt drink.⁵ In North America, shiitake’s versatility and caramel-like flavor have not gone unnoticed: shiitake dishes are turning up in premier restaurants and fine cuisine magazines.⁶ But flavor is not the only reason this mushroom has come to be praised.

NUTRITIONAL VALUE

Shiitake’s food value alone makes the mushroom a welcomed contribution to our increasingly diet-conscious world. Shiitake is a good source of protein, potassium, and, including the stems, zinc, an important element for immune competence. It is also a rich source of complex carbohydrates called polysaccharides and contains more than one that is known to potentiate the immune system, a subject we will take up in later chapters.

If all these factors seem a lot for one mushroom, that is not surprising; mushrooms are a neglected source of human nutrition. The director of the Research Centre for Food Protein at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Professor S. T. Chang, states, “When one considers that they can be produced on waste materials—converting products of little or no market value into food for an over-populated world—then there is no doubt that mushrooms represent one of the world’s greatest untapped resources of nutritious and palatable food for the future.”⁷

How many know, for instance, that the proteins in mushrooms hold all the essential amino acids needed in our diet? Or that they contain generous amounts of leucine and lysine, essential amino acids found wanting in the majority of our cereals? Mushrooms are higher in essential amino acids than soybeans, kidney beans, peanuts, or corn. They place almost as high as milk.⁸ Amino acids make up close to 14 percent of the dry shiitake mushroom,⁹ and essential amino acids make up more than 40 percent of the amino acid content of shiitake’s protein.¹⁰ A study of Japanese adult males who ate 40 grams of the mushroom per day as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. A Food from the Forest
• 2. Shiitake in Folk Medicine
• 3. Shiitake and Cholesterol
• 4. Cancer Research
• 5. Cancer Prevention
• 6. Warring with Viruses
• 7. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
• End Notes
• Also by Kenneth Jones
• About the Author
• About Inner Traditions
• Copyright